Back Pain Device Produces Orgasms

All he was trying to do was
ease her chronic back pain, but when Dr. Stuart Meloy placed an
electrode into one patient’s back, she groaned.

Not in pain, but in delight.

“She said, ‘You’re going to have
to teach my husband how to do that,’” Meloy, an
anesthesiologist and pain specialist in Winston-Salem, N.C., said in a telephone interview.

Meloy had stumbled onto an unexpected side effect of the
pain device he was using — an ability to cause orgasm.

He has just patented this unexpected use of the device, a
spinal cord stimulator made by device company Medtronic. Now he
is trying to talk Minneapolis-based Medtronic into testing and
marketing the device for this use.

A Routine Operation

It all started with a relatively routine operation for
Meloy, who was trying to help a patient with severe and
untreatable back pain.

“She had had a number of back surgeries for degenerative
disk disease and fusion surgery,” Meloy said.

He was trying Medtronic’s spinal cord stimulator to see if
it might work in her case. “These people are either suffering a
lot or there is certainly a place for narcotics to be used.”

The surgeon has to place an electrode very precisely in the
patient’s spine. The idea is to find the specific nerve bundle
that is carrying his or her pain signals to the brain.

It requires some trial and error and sometimes, Meloy said,
the surgeon hurts a patient, who will groan or cry out.

She Made a 'Different' Sound

At first he thought this had happened with this patient.

“But the sound that she made was a little bit different. I
asked her what it was,” he said. That was when she recommended
he teach her husband the technique.

“The next day in the operating room, the nurses were all
asking me how one gets that,” Meloy deadpanned.

Meloy said he repositioned the electrode and was able to
help the patient’s pain. “We able to reduce her narcotics usage
by about a half,” he said.

He was not able to offer her a dual use of the
pacemaker-sized device, which is implanted under the skin.

A Buzzing Sensation

The device works not to block pain but to change the way
the patient perceives it. “Instead of feeling pain, they feel
what most people describe as a buzzing sensation in the
affected area,” Meloy said.

“It’s not so much a distraction as a change in perception.
You are altering what they feel.”

This seemed to work the same way in pushing the a patient’s
orgasm button. “Yes, she literally got a buzz,” Meloy sighed.
“Yes, we turned her on. The puns can go on and on.”

But he hopes to turn this to a serious use.

“Once you get past the giggles and smirks, as far as
orgasmic dysfunction goes, it is a very real problem. People
don’t like to talk about it. But if we are going to utilize a
device like this, it would be to allow people to have more of a
normal life than some sort of supernormal life.”

No 'Orgasmatron'

In other words, no “Orgasmatron” as featured in the 1973
Woody Allen movie Sleeper.

Meloy hopes he could develop the device for temporary use,
to retrain a patient’s sexual response. “You could just get
them back in the groove or whatever.” Then the device could be
used outside the body via a catheter.

But Meloy stressed it was no toy.

“Even for pain management patients we certainly exhaust all
other possibilities before we start utilizing this type of
technique,” he said.

Will it work on all kinds of people, men as well as women?
“I observed it twice,” Meloy said.

“I hang out with other people who do pain management, and I
have heard of it working with men as well,” he said.